Before migrating to Lemmy, I decided to request a copy of the data Reddit has on me.
To my surprise, the export includes a file ip_logs.csv with a list of all IP addresses that I used to connect to Reddit for the last 3-4 months!!
That seems quite unnecessary.
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Not 100% applicable here, but some websites use stored ip addresses as a safety measure, since a stored ip address' location can be compared against that of the current login attempt. This way, a guy trying to steal your account from the other side of the world would be flagged and you'd be alerted via email and such.
You're asolutely right, IP addresses are kind of a grey area since the are needed for lot of troubleshooting and debugging.
Nevertheless, you can always strive to reduce the stored data.
For your application, you wouldn't even need to store the historic IP adresses, just a rough geo-location and maybe a mobile/landline/whatever-flag and comparing the current login attempt to that. Even saves you some performance by not repeating the geo-lookups everytime.
Implement your failed-login counter separately by account and source IP and you've got decent security without linking an account to an IP.